GigE Astronomy Cameras

Blogged by Xiao Sun on November 11, 2009 and tagged with About Us, Community, FAQ.

As you have probably read in our Newsletter, The Imaging Source officially released its new line of GigE astronomy cameras last month. Now you see three categories at the astronomy cameras' official web - USB, FireWire and GigE. There are only three things different with the new models:

  1. A 10-meter Cat 6 Ethernet cable is shipped with camera. In fact, the GigE protocol allows you to extend the length up to 100 meters without a repeater, if you really want to.
  2. A power supply is shipped with the camera. Since the Ethernet cable does not provide power to its connected device, you will need this unit to get camera working.
  3. The YGB0 format allows you to have 10-bit grayscale image data at the output of a GigE astronomy camera. This is only possible for GigE cameras! It could be a good news for stacking processing. **

The rest of GigE camera, like parameters control, image acquisition and exposure [...], are all the same as its USB and FireWire counterparts.

Feel free to contact us should you have any question on the GigE cameras or the setup. You can reach us by replying this post or sending emails to info@theimagingsource.com.

Clear Sky!

** Please note that IC Capture.AS is only a video recording tool. It does not perform any complicated image processing functions. You will be able to capture YGB0 (10-bit) AVI by selecting AVI Codec to "Unspecified" in IC Capture.AS.

Moreover, the framerate under YGB0 could be halved compared with Y800, because every pixel takes two Bytes under YGB0, instead of one Byte at Y800.

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